Yeah, I thought I remembered Ben saying he couldn’t kill Whidmore:
Yeah, but everything Ben believed in at that time could be (and likely is) a lie. He could have believed he couldn’t kill Widmore, but that doesn’t mean it was so.
Yes, let’s “fix” things so that we’re all dead.
They may want to rethink going along with this plan.
Perhaps Ben isn’t really bad, but killed Widmore to spoil FLocke’s plans. Maybe he purposely broke the rules to screw things up. To force a stalemate (for lack of a better term.)
So…going back to N9IWP spoilers…no longer any reason to keep it a spoiler…
What did I miss that answered why Sun said “It’s him” of the Alt-Locke? Is it the fact that Alt-Locke is a critical cog in the Alt timeline (which we already “knew” anyhow)?
If one ever needed to obtain unobtainium, I think Alt-Desmond is the only man who could obtain it.
It’s possible that Widmore was protected until he brought Desmond back to island and “activated” him. Even though they’ve never spoken with Jacob, Ben and the Others’ Higher-ups seemed to understand that some people can’t die if the island needs them for something, like Michael was.
Uh, why wasn’t “Kwon” crossed off the wall if “Austen” was crossed out when Kate became a mother?
Also, where is everybody?
My assumption is this answered the question of which Kwon was on the wall, meaning Jin.
I know it sounds dopey but I am going to miss Desmond (and Hurley and Sawyer and Miles).
I kinda like the way all the misc. characters are coming together in the alt-timeline
Good call, Blueberry.
I’m desperately hoping for a satisfying conclusion. This episode raised me up from total despair to cautious optimism.
Anyone catch what Jacob said while rinsing his hand in the creek water?
Couldn’t quite tell what it was, so it must have been more Portuguese. 
Recorded earlier, watching now. Was commenting some as I went, and then my damn browser crashed and shut down… argh.
I like how ALT Desmond has become the Puppet Master.
I find Zoe, or whatever her name is, kind of annoying. Somebody needs to shoot her already. Or feed her to Smokey-the-Monster.
So Widmore says that Jacob visited him, “after you people blew up my freighter”. Ahem, it wasn’t HIS people that blew it up – it was YOUR people (Keamy) who blew it up, having rigged it with enough C4 to blow a hole in the moon.
So is Widmore telling the truth about Jacob? I’m skeptical.
Richard learns how to fly.
Is Ben succumbing to the temptation “You can have the island all to yourself” – and going to try to kill everybody still standing, after all?
FLocke: “Wait out here. You don’t need to see this.”
Ben: “I want to see it.”
HAHAHAHA – ouch. All geared up for a little revenge for Alex. Ben now sliding back to his evil ways? So much for the lesson learned from his experience with Ilana. And he had become even somewhat sympathetic then. Guess we should have been cheering for Ilana to blow him away sooner.
Ben: “Did you say there were some other people to kill?”
Damn.
Wow – now they all see the Ghost of Jacob Past.
“It’s just a line of chalk in a cave; the job is yours if you want it, Kate.” HAHAHA…
A feeling I’m getting on how this could end… Jack becomes the new Jacob, he manage to kill the MIB with a little help from his friends, but somebody else goes into the cave, and a NEW Smokey is born. Possibly Ben? And history repeats. Jack now has to keep Smokey 2 bottled up… and the wheel turns.
Hahaha… “He’s a crazy person who turned himself in.”
“What’d you turn yourself in for?”
“I ran over a guy in a wheelchair.”
“You see what I mean?”
Desmond is awesome. 
Heh – ALT Hurley: “you didn’t tell me Ana Lucia was gonna be here”. So now he knows a whole lot more crossover stuff, it appears.
Well that last news may not make Ben happy. Smoky tempted him with “When I leave the island, you can have it to yourself.”
“I’m going to destroy the island” doesn’t exactly fit in with that offer of letting Ben have the island.
Jacob: The One Smokey was forged in the glow of the Light Cave. Only there can he be undone. You must take Smokey to the Cave of Light and cast him back into the glowing chasm from whence he came. One of you… must do this.
Jack: I will do it. Though… I do not know the way.
Sawyer: You have my hoard.
Hurley: And my dough.
Kate: And my ass…
Instant classic. I’ll watch that.
The non-snarky response is that it’s the same incantation that Mother said last episode.
I don’t need to know the truth behind all the little mysteries, but I’d sure like to understand what’s at stake when we’re heading in the final episode. What exactly does The Monster want to accomplish? So far we’ve heard that he wants to:
- Leave the island
- Go home
- Get to the heart of the island
- Destroy the island
- Kill everyone and make all that is undone
So which is it? The cliffhanger line for the end of the penultimate episode (with accompanying musical sting) was “I’m going to destroy the island.”
Yeah, so? Why should we care? Seems like if it’s destroyed then The Monster can’t get to The Light, so problem solved. No more Light, no more guardians, no more plane crashes. Or does that mean everything will cease to be? Yes? No? Maybe? The island is at the bottom of the ocean in the alternate timeline, and it seems to be doing fine, better even. Unless being at the bottom of the ocean doesn’t count as being destroyed, but merely inaccessible?
I can forgive the producers for not giving us a reason for the four toed statue, and stretching out the big mystery for one last shocking reveal, but not giving us a clear picture on what’s at stake has been a huge failure.
I’m making a conscious effort to be optimistic. To that end, I’d say we should only care inasmuch as it would kill everyone on it, including all the surviving main characters.
While this ep was a thousand times better than last ep, I’m still unhappy with the producers.
Knowing that they had all of last season and all of this season to resolve things, they’ve utterly failed regarding the pacing.
The Jin/Sun reunion was perfunctory and took so long that the payoff was meaningless. (We waited like 3 seasons for them to get back together and then they were killed off 45 minutes after that?)
The apocalyptic meeting we’ve been teased with between Widmore and Ben was less interesting and less engaging (and shorter) than the meeting between Alt-Ben and Alt-Principal. I mean…that was it?!
Look, the Indiana Jones gag of the swordsman doing the fancy sword stuff getting gutshot before a big battle only works if there’s no emotional investment in the character. The last three or four eps feel like the producers are going down a checklist saying “Item 45: Jin/Sun reunion. Check. Item 44: Ben/Whidmore resolution. Check.”
Lost is suffering from the same problem as Buffy and DS9—the producers simply don’t know how to plot an arc-they’d set something up at the start of the season, have a few arc-related episodes then mostly forget about the arc (and, granted, do some great stand-alone eps). Then, at the end, you could hear them think “Oh FUCK! WE FORGOT ABOUT THE ARC!” and you’d have like 4 episodes left before the season ended desperately trying to cram in everything they should have spread out over the middle 14 episodes.
B5, for all it’s faults had JMS who was a god of arc-plottery-every episode built to the bigger arc and there was never that feeling of cramming for a final at the last minute that I’m getting from LOST. I’d hoped that knowing that they only had 40 (?) episodes left-(~20 last season, ~20 this season) someone would have sat down and graphed stuff out and dropped a lot of the “monster-du-jour” episodes. For instance: What was the point of giving all that screen time to Dogen? The whole temple scene could have been done in two episodes, tops. The whole time back in Dharmaville seems wasted. The interesting thing about Dharmaville was their origins, how they came to know (and protect themselves from) Smokey, how we got from Hippietown to Super-Mysterious organization, not the nuances of their day-to-day lives. We haven’t seen or heard even one word about the Ben/Whidmore feud since…what…S4? And then they bring it back and wrap it up in about 9 minutes of screen time. This is something that they should have reintroduced earlier in the season and built to. A death that should have been powerful came across as anticlimactic to me.
I’m just disappointed by the wasted opportunities from a storytelling point of view.
As much as I am enjoying puppet-master Desmond, it makes me nervous that all the Losties are ‘waking up’ in the Sideways. They seem to be having pretty good lives - just let them be!
I mentally checked out of the Island timeline months ago. I’m ready for them to just blow the thing or whatever needs to happen, and let the relatively blissful Sideways life continue uninterrupted by a bunch of “come with me because I said so” nonsense. We’ve had six seasons of “you just have to trust me” and I’m so very sick of it.